Rovio is a popular application development firm that is known for bringing the popular Angry Birds series to Apple’s App Store. Rovio has also brought other popular titles to the App Store, such as Bad Piggies and Amazing Alex. Just yesterday, Rovio's Angry Birds Space received a nice update that included thirty new levels and power-ups.

Just how popular is Rovio? The numbers speak for themselves. Rovio has today released figures illustrating their success. With 263 million active monthly users in December of 2012, Rovio has made quite an impact. Rovio reports that they had reached over one billion application downloads in 2012, 30 million of these downloads were during 2012's Christmas week alone. With many people getting iTunes gift cards for the holidays, sales would have been propelled for many developers, including Rovio.

In addition, Rovio also points out that Angry Birds Space was the top selling paid application in the App Store for 2012, which is a huge achievement considering that the App Store has more than 775,000 applications to choose from (not all of them being paid, of course). Rovio worked with NASA to being realistic outer space physics to Angry Birds Space and this certainly grabbed a lot of attention from users.

Rovio recently released Angry Birds Star Wars, which was a joint effort between Rovio and Lucasarts to create a Star Wars-themed Angry Birds game. The game was released in the middle of November, just before the holidays, which would have added to the holiday hype. Angry Birds Star Wars remains at the top of the paid applications section of the App Store, and people's love for Star Wars continues to fuel the downloads.

Rovio promises that 2013 will be another great year for not only the company, but also for users. This could mean that Rovio has plans to expand Angry Birds even further, or perhaps they have different plans for their App Store games.

I wish PopCap would follow Rovio's lead and update/enhance Plants vs Zombies more. The last update for retina was great, but took two years. And there's been nothing since. Hello, PopCap, are you still breathing?